CSC Campaign Report 3: The Library

Now we're cooking with fire: the downtime investigation clocks roll out in full force here, and it was the best move I ever made in the game. You get to hand out lore, spells, and clues like they're candy.

CSC Campaign Index

• Player's guide
• Green Box 
• Library
• NPCs and Anomalies
  
• Operation 1: LAST THINGS LAST
  
• Operation 2: ROOM FOR SECONDS
  
• Operation 3: SPEEDY DELIVERY
• Side-Op: MAGINOT
• Operation 4: UNICORN MEAT

 

The Library

All tomes, grimoires, texts, reference materials, and other media encountered by CSC Team. The numbers next to the Read / Unread status indicate how many Further Investigations have been performed and how many usable bits remain. Skimming books will give you a summary, but not any hidden information.

In Possession

[The numbers in parentheses are how many research chunks exist, and how many have been completed. Question marks means it wasn't read]

• Headhunters and Devils of the Upper Air: The Private Mythologies of Jackson Barrow (1/1)
  
• The Book of Saints and Watchers (?/?)
• Loss of the 7th Goddess: Drawing Connections Between the Discoveries at Çift Tepe (?/?)
  
• Untitled Grimoire (2/2)
• The Adytum Hymnal (3/6)
• The Horse’s Eye (?/?)
• The Uranaka Book (?/?)
• Age of the Serpents (?/?)
• Meditations on Bodily Physick (?/?)
• Tale of Sir Gaub and the Worm (?/?)
• manifestoFINAL.docx (1/1)
• The Black Binder (1/1)

[God, I fucking hate how blogger has no native formatting for tables. They'll kill this site long before they would ever consider giving us markdown.]

Known

• The Black Book of Tsan-Chan (Referenced in manifestoFINAL.docx)

Detailed Summaries

Headhunters and Devils of the Upper Air: The Private Mythologies of Jackson Barrow

(Gerhart & Doyle, U of OK Press, 1985.)
Unnatural +2%. Occult +4% History +1% -1d4 SAN

Doctoral dissertation on charismatic preacher Jackson Barrow, his followers and their short-lived commune founded during the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.

Barrow was a member of the 7th Day Adventists, and his followers maintained many of those beliefs through to Oklahoma. He diverges from the norm of that denomination, however, with his elaborate descriptions of the structures and inhabitants of the spiritual realm above. According to Barrow, the war to cast Satan into Hell ended in a stalemate: Satan lies trapped and crippled in hell, unable to escape. God and the chosen elect have fortified themselves within the Seventh Heaven: all the other heavenly realms were left empty , and have come to be repopulated by a long list of devils and monsters born from Barrow’s imagination. These forces do not serve Satan, Barrow claims, but the Outer Darkness itself. Barrow focuses a great deal on the Headhunters, whom he blames for the decapitation-deaths of both livestock and some of his followers.

While the academic text is dry, the excerpts from Barrow’s own work are haunting, stark, and well-composed. The description of devils descending from the sky in their shimming chariots in the Oklahoma night lingers with you long after you finish.

RITUAL: Make Contact (Devils of the Upper Air) - The book contains descriptions of the sect’s rituals and services, including a detailed schematic of a ritual to summon devils of the Upper Air and compel them (through perhaps-excessive invocation of Jesus) to grant the summoner their powers.

Untitled Grimoire

(Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, ~ 1620s)

A low-quality pdf scan of an early modern grimoire, found on Agent Merriweather’s Laptop. While extremely fragmentary, it contained

Part 1: Descriptions of ritual procedures and a magic circle

• RITUAL: Perfecte Discoverie - At the cost of 1d6 SAN and an object belonging to the target, this ritual will grant the user a vision of the exact location of a target. Works best with people, but could theoretically be used with anything.

Part 2: While not contained in the book itself, researching the author revealed that he was a long-term prisoner in the Tower of London and a prolific author of alchemical and occult texts.

[This is an extremely deep-cut reference to SCP-2264]

The Adytum Hymnal

(Unknown compiler; translator Arthur Fisher, 1881.)
1d8 SAN, + equal Unnatural, +4% Occult, +4% Anthropology

A collection of texts from or regarding the ancient city of Adytum, believed to be somewhere in the Carpathian or Ural Mountains.

Part 1: This portion is dedicated to a translation and analysis of a series of tablets in Akkadian cuneiform, describing cultures and civilizations on the edges of the known world. The city of Adytum is mentioned in passing, as well as an empire that Fisher the  translator rendered as "the Daevas", but their locations are vaguely "far north" and "far north-east", respectively.

Most of the detail is given to describing a tribe called the Lušārātum (“hairy men”) to the northwest, likely somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains or eastern Anatolia: they are described as being a little shorter than an average man but much wider in the chest, with broad noses, heavy body hair, and no worked metals. Among their gods there is one named by the Akkadian writer as NIN-SU-GAL – the “Lady of the Great Body” or “Lady of the Great Flesh” - who was both feared and revered by this people and often antagonistic to their other gods. She was said to live in a cave in the mountains, and the Lušārātum tribes would offer her animal sacrifice. The particular elder that the Akkadian scribe’s source was speaking to said that his people long ago offered her meat from the “tuktuun”, which neither the scribe nor Fisher were able to identify, but which you are pretty sure from the description is a mammoth.

• RITUAL: Call upon NIN-SU-GAL – A means to summon and propitiate the Lady of the Great Flesh, derived from the rites of the Lušārātum.

Part 2: This portion is dedicated to worship songs from the folk practices of a people called the Vaśńa of Sarvi, located in Finland. Their religious beliefs are collectively called Nälkä – briefly summarized, the Nälkän cosmos is ruled by the god Važjuma, a mindless and reviled creator and destroyer of all life who has trapped all of creation in a prison of matter and suffering. Following the example of their ancient high priest Yon, Nälkäns seek to overcome the influence of Važjuma through modification of the body – tattooing, scarification, and extensive piercings at the most basic level, and then on to transformative rites that, if they are not metaphorical, would assuredly be unnatural.

Part 3: This portion is dedicated to the prayers and songs of the priests of the House of Flesh. They are primarily invocations of the high priest Yon and assorted saints (klavigars) against the God-Eater and its servants the Vultaas, as well as requests for spiritual guidance from the klavigars. Most of the cultural references make little sense to you, but you do get several more references to the Daevas, who appear to be the primary military rivals to Adytum and are repeatedly described as “enslaved to the God-Eater, though they think themselves its master”.

• NEW RITUAL: Invocation of the Klavigars – Call upon the holy ones of Adytum for aid. You may burn 1 SAN, and if your prayers are heard, you will receive +10% to a skill roll for each point burned.

[No more deep cuts, these are just blatant. Part 1 is mostly of my own making, but 2 and 3 are more or less direct summaries of  Proto-Sarkic /  Nälkän belief.]

[I am also obligated to link to "Excerpt from Festive Nälkän Chant #1 & #2" by niram, which inspired this entire section because I wanted an excuse to use those songs. They absolutely slap.]

manifestoFINAL.docx

(Michael Hill, 2014-Present )

A raving mess of race science, antisemitism, Christian millennialism, anthropogenic climate change viewed as a means of social darwinism, ravings against a secret global conspiracy seeking to build a capitalist-technofascist government from the economic fusion of China and the United States, etc etc. It is at its most coherent in the early iterations and becomes increasingly unhinged as the years go by.

• Hill was dishonorably discharged from the army in 2013 (got in one too many fights)
• Earliest version is from 2014, most recent was the beginning of this year.
• Hill brought up the name Rochefocauld several times in the manifesto, using it seemingly interchangeably to refer to a single person, a group of people, and a company. He doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with it, and ends up dropping the thread pretty early on, apparently considering the lead less interesting than more typical conspiracy fare. It’s one of many parties listed in long, breathless paragraphs as enemies of The West ™
• Hill seemed to have come into possession of the tapes sometime in 2019, from an anonymous seller. There is a noticeable shift in the content and style of the manifesto in versions saved after this point, as it swiftly becomes focused on the tapes and their contents. There is also a shift in the pornography at this time, namely that he stops collecting it shortly after. Further supporting Princess’ theory that the Woman was preying on Hill's paranoia, she did not initially reveal her face.
• Hill’s obsession with the Woman on the Tape is overpowering, as is the resultant degradation of his grip on reality. He is convinced that she is a scion of his feared Great Empire To Come, and waffles between virulent hatred and obsessive desire in some truly impressive displays of cognitive dissonance. His descriptions of the tapes’ contents and the Woman’s speech are rarely coherent, but you can pick out that
• Hill mentions feeding large amounts of store-bought meat to MEAT BOX, then moving up to animals – squirrels, birds, and raccoons at first, moving up to cats, dogs, deer, pigs, cows, anything. It seems like he believed both that it was necessary to keep her satiated to forestall the coming of the Great Empire, and he would be rewarded for doing so.
• At one point he directly correlates the Woman with the “god-eater of Adytum”, either as a manifestation of this entity or one of its servants. However these sections seem to have been written prior to his acquisition of the Hymnal.
• References to other books are so mashed up with the rest that it’s difficult to parse more.

[This part needs some refinement vis a vis Hill's beliefs and possible connection to Tsan-Chan. Could have done a lot more with the Woman preying on his paranoia as well.]

The Black Binder

(Unknown Author, ~1850s?)

Anonymous first-person accounts of the Taiping Rebellion. Clearly machine-translated. The section highlighted by Hill can be summarized as follows:

A woman arrives in a famine-struck village, announcing that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions. When the villagers say they have nothing to give, that they have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven. However, the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. A fight breaks out among the villagers as she leaves, twirling her parasol and laughing.

[You might recognize this one, I get a lot of mileage out of it]

Known Rituals

• RITUAL: Make Contact (Devils of the Upper Air) - ?d? SAN. Summon, bind, and enter into contract with devils of the upper air.
• Perfecte Discoverie - 1d6 SAN. Offer up an object belonging to the target; this ritual will grant the user a vision of the exact location of a target. Works best with people, but could theoretically be used with anything.
• Call upon NIN-SU-GAL - ?d? SAN. Summon the Lady of Great Flesh, seeking boons.
•  Invocation of the Klavigars - 1 SAN. Call upon the holy ones of Adytum for aid; if your prayers are heard, you will receive +10% to a skill roll for each point burned.

[These spells suffer from being very poorly defined: I love playing DG, but whenever it comes to making something for it that involves numbers, my brain just freezes up.]

**

Next installment is the last of the pre-report posts: NPCs and monsters.